


memories you bury or live by

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan Sims
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-30 23:47:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19413997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: Jon doesn't call back.





	memories you bury or live by

**Author's Note:**

> Written for twodrunkencelestials on tumblr, for the prompt "Fluffy as you can make it platonic cuddle between Jon and Georgie set somewhere season 4" 
> 
> The title comes from the ever-applicable Vienna Teng's "Never Look Away," which is as Beholding as anything is.

As soon as she gets home from the hospital, the anger leaves her in a quick, almost heady rush. She makes herself tea and sends Jon a text: _I’m sorry for yelling earlier. I’m just worried about you. I’ll come over later, okay?_

She doesn’t get a reply, which is--not surprising, actually. Jon likes to lick his wounds after a fight, always has. She opts to leave him alone for a while. Give him some space.   
  
Three days and several texts later, Georgie decides to just stop by his flat after work. She goes to pick up some takeaway just in case he hasn’t been eating even though he _just_ woke up from a _coma_ , which would be just-–maddeningly in character, but the queue at the takeaway place is unexpectedly long, and then there’s a delay at the station, and then when Georgie tries to catch a bus to Jon’s neighborhood instead, the bus zooms right past the stop she’s waiting at and splashes her with rancid rainwater. She winds up just going home instead, putting the twin containers of Thai food on her counter. 

She tries calling Jon after she gets out of the shower, but she just gets his voicemail. “Listen,” she says, tired. “I know you’re mad, but can you please call me back?” There’s a strangle crackle of static on the other end before she hangs up.   
  
Jon doesn’t call back.   
  
*  
  
For the first week, Georgie thinks maybe this is just-–just Jon being Jon. By the second week, she thinks maybe-–she feels guilty even thinking it, but maybe even he came back from the hospital with fewer feelings than he had before, taken another step down the dark road he’s been walking.   
  
But she tries to go to his flat again the third week, and again she doesn’t make it there. She calls his phone again and again, and gets his voicemail every time. She tries calling Martin-–he was at the hospital more often than she was, the first few months–-and she doesn’t even get voicemail, just static. She can't get in touch with Melanie, either. 

At the end of the month, she takes a cab directly to the Magnus Institute, intent on seeing this through, whatever it is, and halfway to Westminster the driver swerves into oncoming traffic, and Georgie winds up in A&E with a sprained wrist.   
  
She sits there grimly in the hospital waiting room, staring at her phone. There’s a little crack on the screen, and it looks almost like a smile.   
  
“All right,” she says evenly. “I guess he hasn’t been getting my messages, then?”   
  
There isn’t a response, but the noises from the rest of the hospital abruptly get quieter, like someone’s turned down the volume on the room.   
  
Georgie nods. They picked the wrong woman to frighten, she thinks, not for the first time. “Yeah,” she says. “I thought so. So this is-–what? Your way of telling me to step off?”   
  
A noise breaks through the quiet, unnaturally loud–-it’s the old man with the dislocated shoulder, and his wrenching, pitiful sobs.   
  
It’s obviously a threat.   
  
Georgie first met Jon when they were both twenty years old and he had the world’s worst haircut and an accent she was pretty sure he was putting on. She was his first girlfriend, which means she was the first person to ever kiss him stupid in the library stacks, the first person he ever had a full-blown panic attack in bed with, and the first person to pet his hair in the early morning while he rested his head on her stomach and murmured things from his reading about nineteenth century spiritualists into the air between them. He was her best friend for a while, and a terrible boyfriend for a while after that, and then after an awful fight where they didn’t speak for two years he was mostly just a bruise she’d press on every once in a while, checking she could still feel things. He loves her cat and he won’t be persuaded to get his own even though it would _obviously_ make him happier, and he doesn’t sleep enough and if left to his own devices he’d try to live on breath mints and tea and argue that the cream and sugar are enough caloric intake to be getting on with.   
  
She loves the bastard, basically.   
  
“Well,” she says to the quiet hospital, the cracked screen and the unobtrusive white mist seeping out of the air vent, “Fuck you, then.”   
  
*  
  
What Georgie knows about-–avatars, and entities, and all of that–isn’t much, but she’s fairly certain none of them are infallible. Jon certainly isn’t, and he’s the avatar of something that’s meant to be All-Knowing. So she starts varying her pattern, hoping to catch whatever thing it is keeping her from Jon off guard. She still calls, but at random times–-twice in a row at midnight on a Tuesday, then leaves it alone until a month later, when she calls at three pm every weekday for two weeks running. Same thing with emails, texts, all of it. Everything gets sloppy eventually, particularly with apocalypses and whatnot happening. She’s sure of it.   
  
Once she actually sees Martin at a coffee stall in Waterloo Station, looking even more exhausted than when she'd last seen him in the hospital, but somehow she can't fight her way through the queue in enough time to catch him. She's sure he doesn't even see her, although she called out.   
  
It’s a couple months later that whatever it is finally slips. Ironically, it’s got nothing to do with Georgie’s quietly determined campaign, either.   
  
It’s a Saturday, and it’s nice out, and she is meeting a date in Mayfair in a few hours, so she decides to bring a book and read in the park. She’s sitting crosslegged under a tree when she hears it–-somewhere on the path behind her, a man is telling a story.   
  
Not a-–normal story. He sounds very calm about it, but there’s something about-–how he’s talking, the seamlessness of it, that rings an alarm in Georgie’s mind. 

Very carefully she gets up, slides her book back in her bag. She walks down to the path, and as she gets clear of the bushes she sees them: two men sitting on a bench. One of them is a stranger, and he’s the one talking.   
  
The other one is sitting uncomfortably–- _uncharacteristically_ close, staring at the other man with a look she’s never seen on his face before. Pure hunger. He looks ravenous, nearly frightening with it.   
  
But of course Georgie isn’t afraid.   
  
“Jon,” she says, but it comes out too quietly at first. He doesn’t so much as glance at her, even though she’s nearly right on top of them. “ _Jon_ ,” she repeats again, more firmly this time, and that does it.   
  
Jon looks at her, and for a second he looks angry-–and then he blinks, and frowns, and it’s like she can see him coming out of it. Coming awake. “–-Georgie?” he says, like he’s trying to remember something he’s forgotten.  
  
“Oh my god,” the stranger says, sounding sick, and staggers to his feet.   
  
“Wait,” Jon says, reaching out to him, but the stranger jerks away, visibly terrified, and Jon glances at Georgie and flinches.   
  
“Get the hell away from me,” the man says unsteadily, and then he’s running–-actually _running_ away.   
  
“Jesus, Jon,” Georgie says, and Jon blanches, looks even more miserable than he did already, which was–-pretty fucking miserable, if she’s being honest.   
  
“I,” Jon says, looking down at his own hands, “I can’t–-maybe you should-–leave,” he begins, but Georgie doesn’t let him finish because she’s dropping her bag to the ground and flinging herself at him, wrapping him firmly in her arms.   
  
Jon is stiff and resisting for a moment, and then he–- _crumbles_ into her, head dropping down to her shoulder and hands clutching at her shirt, like she might disappear if he stops hanging on. She feels basically the same, squeezing him hard in her arms. After a few minutes he starts trembling, and she strokes the back of his neck with her thumb, smooths her other hand mindlessly over his shoulders. She’s blinking back tears herself.   
  
“I found you,” she says, watery, and he chokes into her shoulder. “Something was-–was keeping me away, but I _found_ you.”   
  
“It’s all, um,” Jon says into her shoulder, muffled. “It’s all gone to hell, Georgie.”   
  
“It’s okay,” she says, with no idea if that’s true. The fleeing stranger crosses her mind with an unpleasant shiver. She opts to say something that is true, to make up for it. “I’ve got you, my darling. I’ve got you.” 

Jon lets out something that sounds suspiciously like a sob.   
  
She holds on as tight as she can. 

**Author's Note:**

> you guys i love jon and georgie very much


End file.
